that we ought to have had a state independent of
the aristocracy. It is true that rich Americans do sometimes covet the
monuments of our culture in a fashion that rightly revolts us as vulgar
and irrational. They are said sometimes to want to take whole buildings
away with them; and too many of such buildings are private and for sale.
There were wilder stories of a millionaire wishing to transplant
Glastonbury Abbey and similar buildings as if they were portable shrubs
in pots. It is obvious that it is nonsense as well as vandalism to
separate Glastonbury Abbey from Glastonbury. I can understand a man
venerating it as a ruin; and I can understand a man despising it as a
rubbish-heap. But it is senseless to insult a thing in order to
idolatrise it; it is meaningless to desecrate the shrine in order to
worship the stones. That sort of thing is the bad side of American
appetite and ambition; and we are perfectly right to see it not only as
a deliberate blasphemy but as an unconscious buffoonery. But there is
another side to the American tradition, which is really too much lacking
in our own tradition. And it is illustrated in this idea of preserving
Washington as a sort of paradise of impersonal politics without personal
commerce. Nobody could buy the White House or the Washington Monument;
it may be hinted (as by an inhabitant of Glastonbury) that nobody wants
to; but nobody could if he did want to. There is really a certain air of
serenity and security about the place, lacking in every other American
town. It is increased, of course, by the clear blue skies of that
half-southern province, from which smoke has been banished. The effect
is not so much in the mere buildings, though they are classical and
often beautiful. But whatever else they have built, they have built a
great blue dome, the largest dome in the world. And the place does
express something in the inconsistent idealism of this strange people;
and here at least they have lifted it higher than all the sky-scrapers,
and set it in a stainless sky.

_In the American Country_

The sharpest pleasure of a traveller is in finding the things which he
did not expect, but which he might have expected to expect. I mean the
things that are at once so strange and so obvious that they must have
been noticed, yet somehow they have not been noted. Thus I had heard a
thousand things about Jerusalem before I ever saw it; I had heard
rhapsodies and disparagements of eve